Red Wedge: bringing Labour party politics to young music fans

In the runup to the election, Rock’s Backpages turns to the March 1996 edition of Q magazine to resurrect an oral history of Red Wedge, the political initiative set up by the likes of Billy Bragg, Paul Weller and Tom Robinson 30 years ago

Labour’s behind you … Billy Bragg speaking at the Red Wedge launch at the House of Commons, 1985.
Photograph: Richard Young/Rex Features

Billy Bragg: I suppose the Wedge came about because we all kept meeting at benefit gigs for Nicaragua or whatever. The same faces kept showing up – like Jimmy Somerville, Paul Weller, Tom Robinson – and we all shared similar ideals. Those were the darkest days of the Thatcherite 80s, as well. There was a feeling that something had to be done.

Neil Spencer (Red Wedge press officer): The bus left from Paul Weller’s Solid Bond studio at Marble Arch. It was a bitterly cold day in the middle of winter, and there were a dozen assorted musicians and crew with bags and boxes all over the pavement, and cabbies looking at us as they drove by.

The atmosphere on the bus was electric. There had been nothing like this since the package tours in the 60s. Musicians in the 80s tended to live very segregated lives, but when they had a chance like this to collaborate, they really loved it. Everybody left their egos at the door of the bus and mucked in.

Tom Robinson: The nuts-and-bolts organisation of the tour was down to Paul Weller. It was his touring crew that put the whole thing together. I’ve done a lot of benefits and worthy gigs, and organisation can often be pretty dreadful, but on Red Wedge we’d arrive at a gig and everything would be signposted “This way to dressing rooms” or “Canteen: second on right”. The very fact that there was a canteen was amazing. Sound checks happened on time every day.

Bragg: Weller’s tour manager, Kenny Wheeler, was frighteningly efficient. He kept track of everything and had a system of fines. If you lost your tour pass, for example, you were fined five quid on the spot.

Spencer: First man on the bus every day was Billy Bragg. He treated the whole thing like a military exercise, but Jimmy Somerville drove Kenny up the wall. He was last on every day, and he also had a habit of bus-surfing. He would stand on one leg right behind the driver with his arms out to one side like he was surfing. The big surprise was Richard Coles, the other half of the Communards. He’s a very quiet guy, bespectacled, almost professorial, and then suddenly he’d turn into Paul Daniels and start doing all these brilliant card tricks. Jerry Dammers’ function was to sit red-eyed in the back of the bus with a huge blaster playing reggae at fuck-off volume.

Jimmy Somerville: We supplied the camp element. We particularly wanted to do it in order to provide Red Wedge’s gay visibility. Labour in those days still had a very cloth-cap mentality and we wanted to help change that. We were very out and proud then, and it was great to be two very loud gay blokes in this bus full of straight men.

Bragg: I think the guy I was most pleased to see on the bus was Junior [Giscombe], because he was the one with the most to lose. Musically and socially he came from a different background than the rest of us, so it was great that he came.

Spencer: As well as playing gigs, the musicians had to do press conferences, a lot of meeting and greeting, mixing with local MPs and union dignitaries, people who had never encountered rock musicians and were, frankly, out of their depth.

They expected the tour to be a gong-banging exercise for the Labour party, but we were much more ambivalent about it. So you had these very stolid, long-term party members suddenly finding themselves confronted by young people who wanted to talk about the environment, gay rights, minorities, and to get all these things on the Labour party agenda.

Paul Weller: The MPs we’d meet around the country were more showbiz than the groups. It was an eye-opener; it brought me full circle in how I feel about politics. It’s a game. I’ve very little interest in it. I’m not talking about what’s happening to our planet or our country, but about organised politics.

Tom Robinson: The artists got along very well, but these politicians would turn up and want to go on stage. The last thing we wanted was hardline party blokes going out there and lecturing the crowd on the evils of capitalism. That’s not how you change the minds of rock fans. We had to keep finding new ways of keeping them off.

Spencer: Gary Kemp of Spandau Ballet turned up to do an acoustic set in Manchester. It amazed everybody because Spandau were not what most people thought of as a socialist band, but he was politically well sussed and he played a great set.

Somerville: One of the best things for me was duetting with Billy Bragg on Tracks of My Tears, because I had a bit of a crush on him at the time. I think he knew it too. I mean, you can’t help it, can you? He’s pretty irresistible.

Robinson: One curious thing was that Jerry Dammers refused to do Free Nelson Mandela. We were all keen to learn the chords and have a bash at it because it was perfect for what we were about, but I think he didn’t trust us to do it well enough. In retrospect, maybe he was right.

Lloyd Cole: Billy Bragg asked me to do some dates, and I like him and broadly agree with his politics, so I said yes. Besides, it was an excuse for me to play one of my favourite songs, Read It in Books by [Echo and] the Bunnymen. When I arrived at the Birmingham Odeon, Weller came up to me and demanded to know why I had slagged off his single Walls Come Tumbling Down. I told him it was because I thought it was crap and he said: “Well, Forest Fire ain’t changing nothing”, to which I had to agree. Then he said: “So you really slagged my song off?” I said “Yes” again and he looked at me for a minute, then said: “That’s all right then. Everybody else tries to deny it.”

Bragg: The highlight of the gig in Bradford was Joolz, the punk poetess. She did an impassioned poem all about growing up in Bradford and how she was saddened at the way the city had been allowed to go to ruin. It got more and more passionate and intense, and she held that crowd utterly spellbound, totally silent. I remember standing by the mixing desk and thinking: Incredible – if I’d paid money to see this, I’d be over the moon.

Robinson: There was a real sense of solidarity. When Junior came on in Leicester, he started getting some racist shit from, of all people, some Billy Bragg fans. He rode it out with great dignity and carried it off, and we all crowded round the front of the stage. I was on next so I went out and gave them a bit of a lecture about the measure of a civilised country being how well it treats its minorities and then, to ram the point home, I went straight into Glad to Be Gay.

Bragg: One song I loved doing was Move on Up, as a result of which the Style Council, rather unkindly when I think about it, referred to me as Curtis Mallard for the rest of the tour.

Robinson: Runrig turned up at Edinburgh Playhouse and most of us didn’t have a clue who they were. Then they went out on stage and the whole place went apeshit. Amazing. We were all standing at the side saying: “Who are these guys?”

Donnie Munroe (Runrig): It was unusual for us, back then, to be suddenly thrust among all these top chart acts, but we were really delighted to be able to do the show. We did Dance Called America, because it was about forced emigration from Scotland, and feudalism, and it related to the sense of loss of community that we were experiencing under Thatcherism.

Bragg: Newcastle was heaven and hell. The best gig but the worst day. Right through the tour we had constant problems with the extremists, like our friends in the Young Socialists. They would make promises, without bothering to tell us, that Red Wedge acts would perform in various halls and community centres and so on in the afternoons before the gigs. Then, at the last minute, we’d find out and have to rush off to save their bacon.

Some clown promised the Riverside Club in Newcastle that Red Wedge bands would play there at lunchtime. The poor bloke running the hall ended up with 500 restless Geordies starting to turn a bit grim, and no sign of an act. As it happened, Elvis Costello was playing on The Tube that day, which was done in studios in Newcastle, so somebody had the wit to run round and ask him if he’d come and do something. He had nothing to do with Red Wedge but, God bless him, he went along there and played, probably because he knew there’d be a riot if he didn’t.

Robinson: It was a real shock at Newcastle city hall when the Smiths turned up. Johnny Marr had been around at a couple of shows, but we never expected Morrissey to show. I’d never been a Smiths fan up to that point but I have to say that from the moment they took the stage, they just blew the place away. This was a bona fide rock band at the height of its powers.

Rhoda Dakar (singer, Red Wedge steering committee chair): There wasn’t much sex and drugs and all that on Red Wedge. We didn’t throw TVs out of windows. The last night, we stayed in a castle at Chester-le-Street and got around to playing Murder in the Dark. Jerry Dammers somehow got put into a large box and didn’t get out again until the morning.

Spencer: Room No 4 in the castle was said to be haunted, and Junior Giscombe was telling these brilliant, really scary ghost stories. When Kenny allocated Billy Bragg to Room 4, he bottled out, muttering something about The Shining.

Bragg: Kenny Wheeler was always so proud that he had never lost anybody on a tour, then on that final leg back to London, Mick Talbot of the Style Council somehow didn’t get back on the bus. We’d been on the M1 for about an hour before anybody realised we’d left him at Leicester Forest East service station.

Weller: Looking back, it wasn’t me at all. I’m not into meetings and being part of somebody’s club. I believed in what I believed in, and a lot of those things I still do, but I’d never get involved again.

Bragg: There was a feeling immediately afterward that we hadn’t actually achieved very much, but now, in retrospect, I think we did. We hadn’t set out to change the world, just to create some common ground between young people and the Labour party. I think that’s what we did.